Don’t Brand Your Small Business Website, Position It.

There’s been a bit of talk in the blogosphere lately about small business branding and the idea that the owner’s personality is an integral part of a small business brand ["it's not we, it's me"].

While I don’t necessarily disagree with the comments in these posts, I must confess to getting the heebie-jeebies every time I hear the words “small business” and “brand” in the same sentence. It’s normally associated with amorphous marketing chatter about “building your online brand” and “leveraging brand equity”.

Beware of “Branding” B.S.

The problem that I have with the term “branding” is that it connotes strong images of corporatized, awareness-based marketing.

To “brand” a product or service is to literally imprint your mark on it. Brands started as a way to differentiate items that are (to the naked eye anyway) rather similar (e.g. horses).

By imprinting your brand into the mind of Mr. Consumer, the hope is that, at the time of the purchase decision, your awareness-building will pay off and you’ll be more likely to get the sale.

That’s great, but the branding paradigm just does not apply to most small business lead generation situations.

Unless you’re marketing a mass-market service, and/or have deep pockets and a penchant for spending sprees, then you should be spending every marketing dollar and every ounce of psychic bandwidth generating actual qualified sales leads, not building awareness.

Far too many websites fail because they’re all about eye candy and not enough about effective selling.

Don’t Brand. Postition.

If your primary marketing challenge is online lead generation, then you should think of the Internet as a one-on-one, direct marketing medium, not a branding medium.

* Sidebar *

DIRECT MARKETING: Marketing that aims to elicit a “direct response” from individuals viewing your website [e.g. a newsletter signup, an email enquiry, an order].

MASS MARKETING: Simultaneous standardized marketing to, a very large target market through mass media. [online, this model might be followed by the likes of Google, Odeo, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Amazon]

* End Sidebar *

If the Internet is a direct response medium, then rather than creating fuzzy feelings with diffuse branding efforts, my advice is to focus your energies on effectively positioning your business in the mind of potential clients.

That means answering the question, “Why should I give my business to you, when with one click of a mouse button, or by flipping open the Yellow Pages I can find 10 other providers who offer the same service?”

If you can answer that question in a compelling way, you’ll generate top-quality enquiries and sales leads. And you can do this whether you’re a household name on the Internet, or your website went live only last week.

Further reading

See copywriter Bob Bly’s related post, “Is Madison Avenue Advertising a Total Fraud?”.

Till next time

Will Swayne Online marketing consultant

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